Product Hunt is a platform for discovering new products and brands. It’s like YouTube, but with an emphasis on curating quality content from the best startups out there. It was founded in 2013, and since then it has become one of the most popular destinations for startups to share their stories with consumers around the world.
Zapier
Zapier, a web-based automation tool that lets you connect apps and services to automate actions across platforms, was launched on Product Hunt in 2012.
Zapier has since grown into one of the most popular products on Product Hunt and featured in many publications such as Forbes, The Next Web, and Lifehacker Australia. The company has raised over $15 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz – who saw its potential at an early stage when they backed it back in 2013!
Slack
People can access the information they require through Slack, a business chat platform. Slack revolutionizes business communications by uniting workers to work as a cohesive team. Founded by the Canadian Businessman Daniel Stewart Butterfield, Slack now counts over 46.5K upvotes on Product Hunt.
Notion
Do you know how to code? Ivan Zhao and Simon Last had a brilliant idea almost a decade ago. They started building an app that allowed anyone to make tools, without having to master coding. It wasn’t easy at first and the two had to relocate at a certain point to cut as many costs as possible.
But a couple of years later someone hunted Notion on Product Hunt in 2015 and their creation took off. Their workspace now counts over $10B decacorn and it is catching Google’s and Microsoft’s attention.
After receiving 5,300 upvotes and counting, Notion went on to be nominated for a Golden Kitty Award, Product Hunt’s annual celebration of makers and cutting-edge technology. Notion 2.0 was introduced a further year and a half later.
Framer
They began with a prototyping tool for animation and interaction when Framer originally debuted in 2014, and it was praised and enthusiastically received. But this first success wasn’t enough for them. They continuously developed their product to improve their product-market fit, and they leveraged Product Hunt launches to expand their target market while doing so.
Framer evolved into an all-in-one prototype and website design tool through countless careful iterations. The team unveiled the capability to utilize and create your react components in Framer with the release of Framer X in 2018. Finally, in 2022 it introduced the new Framer, also known as Framer Sites, a set of features that allowed anyone to develop and publish fully functional, no-code websites directly from a design canvas in Framer.
Loom
Did you know that Loom once used to struggle back in the day?
Shahed Khan, Vinay Hiremath, and Joe Thomas, three closest friends who later became co-founders of Loom, however, had success and growth. They did it by utilizing Product Hunt to expand and engage their user base and now count more than 14 million users.
A quality product does not necessarily ensure success. For their product to be seen and make a good first impression, the makers took extra precautions. Key feature improvements that drew attention and highlighted Loom’s unique qualities were announced in the first comments of each launch.
Houseparty
Ben Rubin, the creator of Meerkat, decided to experiment with something new that aims to make it simpler and lighter for us to visit with our friends on a daily basis without the usual formalities. This experiment, now named Houseparty, resulted in success thus far. They raised a $50 million round towards the conclusion of 2016. We’re interested to see how well this software does in the future!
You can quickly connect with different people after opening the app. It’s much more exciting to utilize because you never know who you’ll run into there. Like a genuine house party, the more people you know, the more enjoyable it is.
Robinhood
Do you like to invest? Robinhood is a brokerage service that charges zero commissions, making it simple for anyone to invest without having to shell out the customary fee of up to $10 for each trade they make.
Although they started to struggle in these couple of years, prior to their official launch earlier in 2016, the business pre-sold nearly $1 million in inventory.
The Product Hunt Community can Boost your Startup
Product Hunt is a community of early adopters and influencers. It’s not just about finding out what people are into, but it’s also about building relationships with potential customers and investors. You can use Product Hunt as an opportunity to get press coverage, which will help you build your brand awareness.
Product Hunt also helps you get hired by companies like Google (who hired Optimizely co-founder Tom Hauser), Airbnb (who hired CTO Jeff Lawson), Stripe (who hired former Twitter engineer Kurt Wagner), Dropbox (who hired former Slack engineer Ruchi Sanghvi) or Intuit Quickbooks founder Brad Smith after he built up his profile on ProductHunt from scratch using only his efforts at first until he got noticed by Brad. The later reached out to him soon after reading about his product vision on there!
Conclusion
If you want to launch your product on Product Hunt, the best thing to do is just start doing it. Take our example, we launched Publer’s platform on November 17th. People will find your page, upvote it and share it with their friends. It’s not as hard as it sounds, but are some things that can make your launch more successful than others. The first thing is making sure your product looks good—don’t forget that people want to see something unique or interesting about the product before they decide whether or not they should buy it! The second important thing is getting those 30 upvotes in an hour (which means posting at midnight Pacific Time). If all else fails, give away some freebies or discount codes—you might even get lucky enough for someone famous like Ashton Kutcher or Arianna Huffington (both have launched products on Product Hunt) to mention you publicly on Twitter.
We’re pretty excited to see where Product Hunt goes next, but if you have any thoughts on what we missed or would like us to include in future roundups, please let us know in the comments below!
Vjola Canka
